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Originally Posted by catra121
Ah...so much information that my head is spinning...
I have my attorney working towards getting work comp to approve me seeing Timothy Lubenow at Rush. My fingers are crossed, and I am praying that he is successful, but only time will tell. I really sense that my current doctors are just way out of their comfort zones when it comes to CRPS and seeing someone more specialized with it will be a giant relief. Last visit my current pain doctor even said that she just didn't know what to do and was just percribing stuff for generalized pain.
The nurse from my doctor's office called back (finally) and told be to stop taking the Cymbalta. Not sure what the doctor wants me to do beyond just stopping the Cymbalta.
I think my body may be going through some shock with just coming off the Tramadol suddenly...possibly the Lyrica too since that didn't get tapered off either and I was just told to stop taking it and take the Cymbalta instead. At this point I almost wonder if I should just go off everything and start from scratch since I am just not getting any sort of decent relief from any of it. Even the Lyrica which used to help when I was first put on it (last year) barely was making a dent now (though it DID make a difference that I could notice even if it wasn't much).
Guess I'll find out soon enough and in the mean time...well...I'll survive...
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Too strange that it takes an attorney to get an appointment with a doctor. But then the whole CRPS experience is strange as well. (You too can have an illness at the cutting edge of neuroscience and immunology.) And if you'll excuse a digression on strangeness, you might appreciate the video and/or reading an article that appeared in the NY Times a few days ago, "Venezuela's Prison Paradise: On the outside, the San Antonio prison on Margarita Island looks like any other Venezuelan penitentiary. But venture inside and you'll see how far the rabbit hole goes. . . ."
Video: http://video.nytimes.com/video/2011/...l?ref=americas Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/04/wo...s/04venez.html
Silliness aside, I would strongly suggest that you NOT go off Lyrica without talking to your doctor(s) first, however inept s/he/they may be.
Once upon a time, I had been taking Trileptal (Oxcarbazepine, an anticonvulsant that works by decreasing abnormal electrical activity in the brain). It was a great drug but it can have a nasty side-effect of causing serum sodium levels to plummet without warning, leading to irreversible nerve damage. So after 18 months and frequent if uneventful blood tests, just before I was going into the hospital in Philadelphia for a week-long Lidocaine infusion - so it could fail on the record and my insurance company would then let me move onto ketamine - I was being worked up for an apparently unrelated blood condition at the Mayo Clinic, which Dr. Schwartzman wanted done before I went into his hospital. Out of nowhere, my neurologist called me from LA: the blood work drawn a week earlier was back, sodium levels had dropped 50% in 6 weeks, and I was to discontinued Trileptal at once. Except that no one ramped me up on a replacement med where I was moving about on the fly. By the time I was being wheeled onto the plane to Philadelphia, a week or so later, I was having scalp cramps!
I used to say that someone hadn't lived until they tried scalp cramps, but I'm not sure it's your thing.
Mike